“Everybody thought the EU was about people coming into the country … no-one told of us the benefits”.

It's worth remembering that of the $5 trillion or so the US spends on healthcare, about a third is public spending (Medicare/Medicaid).

we need both to flourish

We don't. The US has flourished very well without a publically funded health care system. There is no point in accusing me of being closed minded while refusing to see evidence that's right in front of your eyes across the Atlantic.

What we need a publically funded health care system for is to protect the poor and those unable to work.

The US gets that badly, badly wrong.

No I am not a Reform supporter, I think Farage would make a dreadful PM and the Yusef announcement today, if he's being quoted correctly, that indefinite leave to remain will be removed from people who already have it, is an outrageous suggestion.

...and the PS cannot pay any tax without an educated and healthy workforce....

..we aren't starting from "Ground Zero" so the current tax payer base were born in NHS hospitals, educated in the public sector.

On America, those HCPs were educated in state schools.....

As you re a Reform supporter (?) i'd be rather careful if you still support the NHS, Reform may have stepped back from full privatisation but i think thats more to do with keeping voters on side, than any genuine desire to keep the NHS.

Anyway, i'm out now, you have very fixed views and cannot even acknowledge the input the public sector provides to our economy/that we need both to flourish.

I really don't see why you think one is more important than the other.

Because you can't spend money on health services that you don't have. The money has to arrive first.

I don't think "important" is the right word to describe that relationship as it implies moral values that aren't part of that argument. It's a case of dependency more than importance.

With no NHS, we would run out of HCP's.... business couldn't train and then give them the experience they require

They do in America!

With no NHS, we would run out of HCP's.... business couldn't train and then give them the experience they require.

But you ve made my point, we need flourishing public & private sectors.

I really don't see why you think one is more important than the other.

What we do need though is to make sure monies spent on Welfare is spent wisely and in the correct amounts, sometimes cost cutting just leads to further expense down the line or in other areas.

See Austerity and slashing children's services or cutting council funding so we now have to spend 10s of billions fixing our roads.

Yes of course the US spends more, it's a very broken system. I brought it up because someone was suggesting that only the NHS can train doctors.

I think you mean insurance won't treat long term conditions. PH will if you're rich enough. A friend's parents are spending the rest of their life savings to extend the time she has left on some cancer treatment that isn't approved by the NHS.

The NHS is fabulous, you seem to be thinking I want it privatised? I don't. I just pointed out that if it wasn't there, employers would buy the health care they need to keep their workers working and the others would get sick and die. It isn't the businesses that would die without the NHS, it's the poor and those unable to work. Like they do in the US.

You do realise that Americans spend absolute fortunes on Healthcare don't you? & if you have no money, it can often be curtains.

Though i'm not sure why you're bring in the USA?

On NHS as a back to PH, yes i ve seen this, as has my DD, PH also don't have AE and few if any ICU facilities.
PHI wont treat long term chronic conditions either, Cancer Strokes etc.

So whilst you can pay for heart op's etc, anything at all that goes wrong and its straight to the NHS.

Some services cover their costs. Some even make a profit.

They are a fleabite in the total cost of the Public Sector which is overwhelming financed from taxation.

@WaryCrow

Already the NHS is a ...... back up to private healthcare,

I have removed unpaid from that quote because it isn't true, and unvalued because that isn't true of anyone I know.,

I and the very many people who have been forced to use life savings to finance vital health care in order to keep some quality of life and prevent our life expectancy from being reduced by damage to our health from delays in treatment would say that you have that sentence completely the wrong way around.

I thank my lucky stars that we were savers when we were younger and earned enough to save.

Are you suggesting that the US doesn't produce good doctors in an entirely private health system?

Yes and the NHS helps keep people in work.

Another one is Education, how many Private Schools fund the training of the teachers they employ? from 'primary to 6th form to Uni... almost all of which gained their training & experience in the public sector, even those who paid fees, were subsidised on their training costs and had placements in the public sector.

Same with Private Health too.

The baseline public service without which none of us would ever have lasted very long and which has pretty much always had some public organisation is/ are the armed forces. Seems fairly relevant at the moment.

Even funding for that is begrudged.

It’s not about the value of the service, it’s that the superrich individuals of the world aren’t making enough money - for what exactly? How many bloody superyachts do the likes of Andrew or even the King need?

It’s difficult to compare services in the past because they were very different worlds, not least much much lower populations. But there’s nearly always been some kind of provision for the poorest and the old. Not centrally organised, true. China worked off almost entirely public sector until very recently, as other societies in the past may have. Alternative organisations are perfectly possible - Britain’s public / private compromises were very different in the past and we were mostly better off for it.

Today‘s public services pay with the value of their work. No one would trust a private Fire Service in today’s world, you’d be into Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. Already the NHS is an unvalued and unpaid back up to private healthcare, and we have the example of Royal Mail forced to provide infrastructure for private delivery companies in front of us still. The trouble is that the value of work is no longer recognised, and ideology continues to force tech and private wealth for the few down our throats. It’s resulting in exactly the squalor, social problems and environmental damage that it did last time.

No, no, yes.

I would agree with you if you had written "the private sector helps by paying for it".

The public sector provide a very, very small percentage of the money that finances public services as a whole, and only very specific parts of it like the Land Registry make a profit that contributes to other departments running costs.

You are correct that some other parts charge for their services and are part or fully self funding but again this is only a tiny part of total public spending.

The NHS has 1½ million employees who are almost entirely paid by taxpayers.

Their service users pay their wages. Which isn't always the tax payer.

Many public sector organisations provide commercial services to businesses that are paid for directly. Or to the public eg DVLA, Passport Office. Or regulators such as the Environment Agency, who charge fees to the businesses they regulate.

I'd have thought that me saying repeatedly "that we need both" makes it very obvious surely?
Public sector provides the educated and healthy workforce for PS to thrive, Private sector helps pay for it....

I was continuing the discussion because you haven't acknowledged who pays for public services.

Of course we were discussing a fantasy situation where public services simply stopped. And of course that would create chaos but it was never a realistic scenario.

What I described is what would have happened if public services had never existed.

Why would (some) business fund this when they can up sticks and go elsewhere?
So Car manufacturing, Pharma, Defence, Finance, energy sectors.... all would leave.
We'd be left with a 3rd world economy.

The rest would fold, business just wouldn't have the means to build/fund schools, hospitals and the staff able to run them.

Public services also use vast amounts of private sector materials and equipment, all those sales gone and a workforce that spends money mostly in private sector.

TBF i'm not really sure what you re arguing for or against? i've already said both are needed.

It isn't true that London Councils don't keep what they raise. What happened was that the amount of money they were given from central funds was reduced and it was diverted to much poorer councils who needed it a lot more.

All councils keep all their own council tax.

Are you suggesting that rich areas in London should receive state funding instead of vastly poorer ones elsewhere?

Are you suggesting a regional system that leaves the wealth created in a region to be spent in that region? If so, do you have even half a clue what the result of that would be?

I don't disagree but it's unrealistic to expect voters or even local councils in London to solve that problem given the cost of living here, and the councils don't keep what they raise as it goes in part to subsidise the north and west!

Only proper regional policy can solve this.

Nobody is saying that we don't need public services.

But you can't have them if you don't have any money to pay for them.

The public sector would not work for free.

I don't agree with you that if public funding of the NHS or education was stopped that the economy would collapse. What would happen is that businesses making profits would pay for the health care and education of the people that they need, and the poor and less trainable and those ill but replaceable would be left to live unhealthy lives and die too young.

We have public services largely to provide more equitably for the whole population and particularly for those at the bottom, not because it keeps business going.

There was a modern economy running fine in 1947 before the NHS, when poor people who were ill stayed ill or died.

Nobody is saying that the public sector is not immensely valuable but in order to keep it running we need governments that understand that borrowing to increase public sector spending which increases GDP is not "growth" and which are not idealogically opposed to the word profit.